Some films don’t announce themselves with big explosions or dramatic fanfare. Sometimes they just slip quietly into theaters, without much marketing, and if you’re not paying attention, you might miss them entirely. The Christophers feels like one of those films. Written by Ed Solomon and directed by Steven Soderbergh, it isn’t trying to overwhelm you or impress you with meaning. Its story simply unfolds scene by scene, revealing itself until, almost without realizing it, you’ve been drawn into something far more personal than you expected.

I went to see it because I enjoy films set in London and I have a special love for films about artists, about the act of artistic creation, and about how artists interpret the world around them through their work. Then there’s Ian McKellen. He’s one of those rare actors who doesn’t just perform a role … he inhabits his roles so completely that the character becomes inseparable from the story itself. There are very few actors I would trust to carry a film on their presence alone, but he’s one of them. That was enough to get me into the theater, without knowing much about the story itself.

What I didn’t expect was how much the film would stay with me, coming up in conversations and in emails to friends. I see a lot of films, and few films have that kind of impact on me.

The Artist and the Myth

At the film’s center is Julian Sklar, a once-celebrated artist whose reputation was built on a series of paintings known as The Christophers. The first series made him famous. The second elevated him into something close to myth. The third was never completed, and over time, their absence became as much a part of his legacy as his completed work because they represent something deeper that shaped him as a man. The film picks up years later, when Julian is much older, more withdrawn, and surrounded by the complicated consequences of the life he built.

There’s a moment in the film that reframes everything you think you understand about him. Julian appears on a British television program called Art Fight, where he is positioned as the sharp, witty authority in the room. He’s dismissive, quick with a cutting remark, always ready with the next clever line that earns a laugh at someone else’s expense. In the moment, it plays exactly how the audience wants and they love him for it. He’s the aloof master, the artist whose approval everyone is chasing, but we get the sense from that scene that there’s something off about it. Why is he like that?

It doesn’t feel cruel, exactly. It feels… constructively defensive, which is the best description that comes to mind. It’s as if he’s pushing people away from something they don’t yet understand, and this is how he sees himself helping them. At the time, no one around him seems to recognize that, not even Julian because he exudes confidence, brilliance, and status. Looking back at that moment from his current point in life, it reads differently. It feels like the beginning of a question the film slowly works its way toward as we silently wonder what happens when the world gives you so much validation that it allows you to bury the pain and loss you experience? How does something like that shape you?

You can watch my “out of the theater” reaction on YouTube:

Seeing Yourself Through Someone Else

That question begins to take shape through his relationship with Lori, played by Michaela Coel. When she enters his life as an assistant to help him organize the things in his house, there’s an immediate friction between them as she decides how to respond to him. We see her discomfort, but he’s oblivious to it. She doesn’t defer to him. She doesn’t accommodate his temperament. Most important of all, she doesn’t play the role he expects people to play around him. In that way she becomes an anomaly in his life, and that catches his attention in a way that others fail to reach.

Their dynamic shifts gradually through the film. Then there is a moment when Julian decides to look her up online. That’s when something begins to click for him. He discovers that she is an artist and that he has seen her work before. However, he can’t quite remember how or where, and what follows is less of a revelation than an inevitable confrontation, but not in a way that I expected. That confrontation isn’t just between the two of them, but within himself between the man he was when he had everything and the man he has become as he sits alone in his house. In that way, Lori becomes a mirror that reflects those hard personal truths back at Julian in a way that he can’t avoid, and he has spent decades avoiding that kind of personal honesty.

What makes their relationship so compelling is that it isn’t built on romance or sentimentality. They are too alike, which makes their connection so much deeper and more complicated because he is also a mirror for her to see who she has become as an artist. There’s a sense of recognition between them, an understanding that forms through tension rather than from comfort. At a certain point, it feels like their meeting was inevitable, forcing them both to confront the parts of their pasts that they have spent years avoiding. The only difference is that Julian is at the end of his life and Lori has the potential to learn from his mistakes. If there’s something like redemption here, it doesn’t arrive in a dramatic feel-good moment that makes everything better. Instead, it emerges slowly, through honesty and discomfort, and through the act of each of them finally being seen clearly by another person.

How the Film Reveals Itself

That idea carries through the entire film. The Christophers isn’t interested in explaining Julian Sklar because it has chosen to let you come to understand him in the same way Lori does over time through their interactions and the accumulation of moments together that don’t always make sense until they suddenly do.

By the time the film reaches its final scene, that understanding feels earned in a way that is emotionally poignant. We see Lori standing in a London gallery, surrounded by Julian’s work. She moves from one piece to the next and we can tell that while she’s looking at the art, she’s no longer just seeing the paintings, she’s seeing the man behind them. The final exhibit we see her enter gives us a few glimpses of him at different points in his life that mirror his earliest creation and the moment when he first inspired her as an artist. We get this quiet view into the younger artist searching for something that she finds in the collection, and we get this sense of peace and regret from her at discovering this moment too late when he is not there to celebrate it with her. It’s through her reaction that we feel Julian and imagine him finally making sense of what remains of his life through his art.

It’s a quiet scene, but it carries a surprising amount of weight because see her seeing him. In that moment we also start to recognize how artists embed themselves in their work, intentionally or not, and the lesson is so very human because we all do this in the things we create, even if we aren’t artists. It’s in the things we leave behind that people finally get windows into the lives we lived, the things we avoided, and the impacts of the things we lost along the way. In that moment, it’s harder not to not see this film as a mirror, which is suddenly turned back on us.

What We Leave Behind

That’s really what The Christophers is about. It’s about those final moments in life when we look back at what we’ve built and realize that what remains doesn’t always reflect what we wanted from life, especially if the bulk of what you see is a monument to personal regret and the paths not taken. Sometimes the most important parts of our lives are defined by the absence of the relationships that we didn’t repair to the truths we didn’t confront … or the choices that we let life make for us. If those gaps are never addressed, they don’t disappear, and they become the shape of our regret as we look back over the years when change was possible.

The film doesn’t present this as a lesson. It doesn’t offer resolution in a traditional sense. It simply allows you to come to that idea on your own and to decide what it means for you.

Recommendation

The kind of storytelling in The Christophers won’t connect with everyone. This is a slower, more introspective film. It’s built on character, on conversations, and on emotional progression rather than fast plot twists. If you’re looking for something fast-paced or externally driven, this probably isn’t a film for you. However, if you’re drawn to films that explore people—who they are, who they were, and who they might still become—there’s something here that feels genuinely human. At the center of it all is Ian McKellen, who creates such a deep resonance with Julian as a character that sometimes it’s easy to believe that they are one and the same.

There’s an honesty to his performance that feels increasingly rare in film today. He doesn’t push for attention by overstating his character. He simply exists within Julian, allowing the smallest shifts in expression or tone to carry meaning. Watching him here, in a role that reflects on age, legacy, and the closing chapters of a long-lived life, it’s difficult not to feel like you’re seeing something deeply personal for Ian himself … even if it isn’t meant that way.

By the end, the film doesn’t ask for a dramatic reaction from us, but I still felt my eyes stinging with tears as the credits rolled because I wanted more for Julian/Ian. If this is the kind of film that resonates for you, I think you’ll love it because it will linger and stay with you long after the credits begin to roll.

For me, that’s enough to say that The Christophers is absolutely worth your time and money, especially if you’re willing to meet the film where it is and let it reveal itself to you over time.